Group items tagged

1. How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything

2. Curiosity Cultivates Creativity

3. Widen Your World

Digital Inclusion Is Everyone’s Job

integrate digital inclusion into all aspects of human services work

Instead of pushing technology away when our community isn’t connected, we should be doing everything in our power to get them connected.

With Gen Ys and even more so with their younger colleagues, the Plurals, socialization occurs through digital devices and platforms, i.e. social media, texting, etc.   Nearly since birth, they have had the freedom to socialize with the world with a few clicks from a wireless device.  They do not like to “talk” on the telephone, even when in the same proximity as the people they are “talking” to. Plurals are said to be the most social group of people in history, yet they socialize almost entirely via digital devices. Younger generations have had control of and access to the world nearly since birth through the Internet. They live in a very autonomous world—a world where they have had a “voice” to the world nearly since birth.  As a result, they like freedom of expression and autonomy.   Instant gratification is a must! They want everything “now” and to move fast.

Drucker’s solutions for fragmented executives—reserve large blocks of time on your calendar, don’t answer the phone, and return calls in short bursts once or twice a day—sound remarkably like the ones offered up by today’s time- and information-management experts.2

Add to these challenges a torrent of e-mail, huge volumes of other information, and an expanding variety of means—from the ever-present telephone to blogs, tweets, and social networks—through which executives can connect with their organizations and customers, and you have a recipe for exhaustion. Many senior executives literally have two overlapping workdays: the one that is formally programmed in their diaries and the one “before, after, and in-between,” when they disjointedly attempt to grab spare moments with their laptops or smart phones, multitasking in a vain effort to keep pace with the information flowing toward them.

First, multitasking is a terrible coping mechanism.

Common Courtesies

91% of Blue Jeans survey respondents said they never met their colleagues in real life—Aaron says it’s important to remember to mute your line if you’re joining from your local cafe or other venue with ambient noise. It also helps to shift your screen so you don’t have glaring outside light emanating from your little virtual corner of the room.

video should keep people engaged and aware that they are visible to the rest of the group. "Treat colleagues with respect because you are there for a purpose," says Aaron, because technology makes it easy to detect if your eyes are wandering.

"We’re at the point where the Internet pretty much supplies everything we need. We don’t really need teachers in the same way anymore."

I was overwhelmed by the number of articles all confirming what I had suspected: The relatively recent emergence of the Internet, and the ever-increasing ease of access to web, has unmistakably usurped the teacher from the former role as dictator of subject content. These days, teachers are expected to concentrate on the "facilitation" of factual knowledge that is suddenly widely accessible.

all computing devices—from laptops to tablets to smartphones—are dismantling knowledge silos and are therefore transforming the role of a teacher into something that is more of a facilitator and coach.

There are more platforms, more websites, more pat solutions to serious problems — here’s an app that can fix drug addiction! promote fiscal responsibility! advance childhood literacy!

The doors to start-up-dom have been thrown wide open. At Harvard, enrollment in the introductory computer-science course, CS50, has soared. Last semester, 39 percent of the students in the class were women, and 73 percent had never coded before.

I protested: “What about Facebook?” He looked at me, and I thought about it. No doubt, Facebook has changed the world. Facebook has made it easier to communicate, participate, pontificate, track down new contacts and vet romantic prospects. But in other moments, it has also made me nauseatingly jealous of my friends, even as I’m aware of its unreality. Everything on Facebook, like an Instagram photo, is experienced through a soft-glow filter. And for all the noise, the pinging notifications and flashing lights, you never really feel productive on Facebook.

Open-source software often gets derided for its downsides—maintenance concerns, the need for development resources, concerns about security—but its huge transparency and collaboration benefits typically get missed.

(It’s worth noting that you may be using open-source software without realizing it: Most major content management systems, including WordPress and Drupal, are based on open-source code bases. Not that you’d immediately think of them in that context.)

Open source tends to follow current standards. The reason Mozilla Firefox gained so much momentum on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer about a decade ago has everything to do with programming strategy. IE, being proprietary and without much competition, didn’t have a reason to keep innovating quickly. Firefox, on the other hand, was in a spot to iterate relatively quickly and drive online development—and when Google Chrome came into the picture, this process moved even faster. This is true of a lot of open-source software. It can ensure you’re working with this year’s model.